A greater focus on Australian stories and voices, more risk taking and a culture of United States-style private patronage have been mooted as ways to rescue the arts industry from its worst crisis in 30 years.

The arts were suffering from a dearth of imagination fuelled by a financial crisis brought about by funding cuts and the recent corporate failures of key sponsors such as HIH and Ansett, the chief executive officer of the Australia Council, Ms Jennifer Bott, told a gathering of key arts industry figures debating the state of the arts at the SBW Stables Theatre yesterday.

Melbourne's major cultural organisations have defended their large share of City of Melbourne arts funding, after funding grants announced last week left some smaller Melbourne arts institutions out on a financial limb.

On the policy side, in the past year alone, as Strickland notes, the council has commissioned and released two reports on the difficulties facing Australia's small-to-medium dance and theatre companies that drew wide attention to the often dire financial circumstances of these groups.

Cause and effect is always hard to prove, but in this year's budget not only was the council's triennial funding renewed at $398 million for 2004-05 to 2006-07 but we received additional funding.

IT was early in Winsome McCaughey's tenure as head of the Australia Business Arts Foundation that a "very senior government person" asked the question: "How long will it be before we can stop funding you and the business sector will take it up?"

Following a six-month review, the Federal Government's arts funding and advisory body announced yesterday that, among other measures, it would abolish its Community Cultural Development Board (CCDB) and New Media Arts Board.

A wallet full of censorshipby DAVID MARR for the Sydney Morning Herald

The debate that began that morning in the party room rolled on all week in the Senate. It was the rarest of events: a passionate debate about the arts among the nation's conservative parliamentarians. Debate is perhaps not the right word because no one rose to support the trimming of the orchestras.

The future of Victoria's longest-running contemporary dance company, Dance Works, is in jeopardy with the Australia Council dumping the company from its 2006 triennial funding round.

The Australia Council's 2005 allocation to Dance Works of $160,000 represented two-thirds of the company's budget this year, with the remaining $80,000 coming from Arts Victoria. The 2006 state funding round is still under deliberation.

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